Читать книгу Heathcliff Is Not My Name: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff - Michael Stewart, Michael Stewart - Страница 7

YOU ARE WALKING THROUGH Butcher’s Bog, along the path at Birch Brink. You traipse across Stanbury Moor, to the Crow Stones. A morass of tussock grass, peat wilderness and rock. There are no stars to guide you, just the moaning of the wind. Stunted firs and gaunt thorns, your only companions.

Perhaps you will die out here, unloved and unhomed. There was the tale of Old Tom. Last winter, went out looking for a lost lamb. Found a week on, icicles on his eyelids, half-eaten by foxes. Or was it the last wolf? Said to roam these moors. The ravens will eat out your eyes and the crows will pick at your bones. The worms will turn you into loam. You’ve forgotten your name and your language. Mr Earnshaw called you ‘it’ when first he came across you. Mrs Earnshaw called you ‘brat’ when first she took you by the chuck. Mr Earnshaw telt to call him father and Mrs Earnshaw, mother, but they were not your real parents. Starving when they took you in. They named you after their dead son. The man you called your father, carried you over moor and fell, in rain and in snow. When finally you got to the gates of the farm it was dark and the man could hardly stand. He took you into the main room and plonked himself in a rocker. By the fire you stood, a ghost in their home. Next to you a living girl and living boy, who spat and kicked. This was their welcome to your new hovel. Over ten years ago now. You’d spent weeks on the streets, eating scraps from bin and midden. Kipped by the docks and ligged in doorways. You’d trusted no one, loved no one, believed in nothing.

It was tough in the new place but you’d had it worse. You’d almost died many times. You’d been beaten inside an inch of your life. Gone five days without food. Slept with rats and maggots. Nothing this new place had in store could harm you more than you’d been harmed before. Or so you thought. The girl was called Cathy, the boy Hindley, and you hated them apiece.